Pete Dye, famous architect of Harbour Town Golf Links, can't sit still, even at 89 years old

The golf cart speeds along in search of the man, working backward through the open expanse that is the back nine at Ford Plantation Golf Club.

Temperatures are in the mid-70s the second weekend of this past November and the south Georgia sky slightly overcast -- perfect weather for a marketing blitz designed to lure more members to this private club.

Members have recently parted with some serious coin to have their 18-hole layout reworked by the ageless architect who built the original design.

There is the man, his cart stopped next to the tee at No. 17. A public relations professional motions you out of the cart.

"Mr. Dye likes to walk," he says.

Pete Dye, 89, hikes the hill to the top of the tee, one brown New Balance in front of the other, clutching the arm of construction partner Allan MacCurrach. The par-3 includes several of his signature bunkers and adjacent Lake Clara, across which wafts a slight breeze.

"You can see the whole damn world up here," Dye says, taking in the sweeping views of what was an antebellum rice plantation.

STILL IN THE GAME

This is still Dye's world, even approaching 90. The man who crafted Harbour Town Golf Links visits sites of the four or five projects he keeps going at the same time, draws greens complexes in the dirt, directs others where to push the dirt, asks superintendents whether grass will grow in certain spots.

He confers with his wife, Alice, a fellow champion golfer and golf mind. He walks the sites, never able to sit for long.

And when the work on a project is done, he tours again.

Maybe all he wants to do is build golf courses, as is the family business, but Dye is long past that being the only part of his job description.

His name is part of the story when a golf course plays host to a major golf championship. He sits for interviews, accepts honorary memberships to courses he has built or rebuilt, drives to Kiawah Island for an impromptu gathering of golf architecture figureheads organized by a golf magazine.

Surely the time has come and gone for Dye to have faded into the shadows of his home Gulf Stream Golf Club, a Donald Ross layout in Delray Beach, Fla., where the Dyes live during the cool months.

But he has to be out here, marveling at how well the grass has grown in on a site he visited almost 30 times when it was just dirt.

"What the hell keeps you going, huh?" Dye asks, turning a question back on a reporter. "I don't know. I've got to be crazy. I enjoy doing what I do."

The man has a moment alone. Those tagging along in carts seem to recognize that, allowing Dye space as stands in the area left of No. 9 green at Ford Plantation.

He waves his wife over when her cart pulls up, and the husband and wife of more than 65 years chat in hushed tones for a few minutes before director of golf maintenance Nelson Caron is called into the conversation.

At issue are the aesthetics behind the ninth green.

The Dyes are concerned about the distraction of the large, white house -- known as "Clara's house," for Henry Ford's wife -- and the cars in the nearby parking lot.

The architect's suggestion is to plant live oaks behind the green to soften the bright white structure. Crape myrtles are already in place to shield the view of the parking lot. The trees need only to mature.

Asked later, Caron says the Dyes' suggestions will have to go to the greens committee, but that Pete and Alice will probably get their wish.

THE FAMILY BUSINESS

One of golf's great power couples met at Rollins College in the 1940s.

Pete played a lot of golf and rarely attended class, Alice recalled during a February interview with Golf Channel. He took a fire hose to his fraternity house and rode to Tampa on top of a boxcar, she said.

After Alice graduated and moved to Indiana, Pete called and said he wanted to talk about marriage. He visited Indiana, played nine holes with Alice and with her parents waiting upstairs to offer their blessing, Pete instead headed for the door.

"I said, 'Pete, what about getting married?' " Alice told Golf Channel. "He said 'Not in golf season,' and left. The following November, when it was cold and miserable, he came back and proposed."

Golf is the family's business.

Pete's father built a nine-hole course on the family's property in Ohio, which the son used to become an accomplished amateur golfer, even out-playing Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer at the 1957 U.S. Open.

It was memories of that U.S. Open setup that perhaps led Dye to craft some diabolical designs when he quit his job as an insurance salesman in his mid-30s to set out with Alice and build golf courses.

Sons P.B. and Perry Dye followed their parents into the family business.Perry was 17 when Harbour Town was built and remembers a lone bar in a seaside shack and not seeing much of his busy father.

Perry sodded bunkers on the new course behind the construction crews.

"By then I was an expert," Perry says. "I started when I was 5. Everyone always asks 'How did you get in the golf business?' My dad turned to me and said 'The babysitter's not here, come with me.' That was it."

STILL STEADY

Pete Dye has returned to Harbour Town numerous times in the more than 45 years since he finished the course just under the gun of the inaugural Heritage.

Always tinkering.

To the question he receives so often these days, as to how he keeps going, consider that this isn't work to Dye. And he attracts like-minded people.

MacCurrach, CEO of his golf construction business, remembers Dye putting him on a bulldozer and helping push dirt to build the driving range at TPC Sawgrass. MacCurrach was 14 and churning out timecards of more than 100 hours each week, sleeping on a cot in the maitenance building after lights on the range shut off as late as 2 a.m.

As Dye's sidekick at Ford Plantation late last year, MacCurrach marvels at the memory of Dye reworking his old design from scratch.

"His energy is what pulled this train along out here," MacCurrach says. "Every time he'd come out here, I'd say 'OK, I'll see you in a month. Two weeks later he'd call me up and say 'OK, I'm on my way.'"

Dye is still in great demand.

He has a new course in the works north of Indianapolis and another in Florida. Several other projects are just wrapping up or planned.

"He's as steady and hard at it as he's ever been," MacCurrach says.

Follow assistant sports editor Stephen Fastenau at twitter.com/IPBG_Stephen.

This story was originally published April 15, 2015 at 11:23 AM with the headline "Pete Dye, famous architect of Harbour Town Golf Links, can't sit still, even at 89 years old."